A Film Canon

The first part of Lang's epic adaptation of the Nibelungen legend exudes an incredible plasticity, or physicality, such that all its characters feel on the verge of morphing into heroic stone; or, alternatively, feel like a raw concatenation of elements, analogous to the spectacular depiction of Iceland that centres the film, their semi-religious sublimity a mere extrapolation of the haloed mountains that enrhythm the narrative, as well as the mystical- liturgical smoke that suffuses it, drawing a common denominator between Siegfried's (Paul Richter) forge, marriage and funeral procession, as well as evoking a race of men that have just emerged from the dimmest recesses of the past, and so find themselves faced with the choice between being completely engulfed by nature, and setting out to heroically embody it. Hence the ambiguity of Lang's taste for overwhelming natural and artificial settings - most poetically the giant causeway that Gunther's (Theodor Loos) ship traverses;most pervasively the forest that Siegfried crosses on the way to the Nibelungen, and where he eventually meets his death. It also informs the proliferation of stark, wide, symmetrical compositions, which imbue the narrative with a coldness that tempers romanticism with modernism, and resists any straightforward political or propagandistic appropriation. If anything, the film stands as a key moment in the development of twentieth-century fantasy, as evinced not only in its meticulous special effects (especially the construction of a life-size dragon), but its recourse to medievalism - or, perhaps more accurately, to medieval myth and legend - as source of exoticism, wonder and adventure.